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The goal of this post is to discuss whether social networking sites such as facebook are viable for advertising or whether they may just cost a small business reputation damage. In this scenario I’m not talking about the paid advertisements on the side of the facebook window but more so the advertising utilized by tagging people who have liked a page. As

Now as he is tagged in this photo everybody with him as a friend sees this image and the advertisement. Personally I find that annoying since it is related to something I have no interest in and surely many others would be in a similar situation.

A questionnaire I posted on face book shows 7/12 people who responded are annoyed by this form of advertisement. Although this definitely allows the small businesses to reach more potential buyers – could this be causing any kind of reputation loss?

I know if was shoe shopping I would be less inclined to purchase any shoes from the company that is creating this advertisement simply due to disliking the advertisement methods.

Question: Would you recommend any small businesses to adopt an advertising scheme similar to the one in the screenshot? If so why? Is the potential reputation loss worth less then the chance of reaching out to all of the potential consumers?

This week I will be discussing the use of social networking sites (SNS) in conjunction with the case study of the Brisbane Airport. The advantages for massive international organizations such as Microsoft and IBM are obvious but how about for an organization with only one geographic location? There are many ways to utilize social networking sites still for these kinds of organizations, however the goal of the social networking site needs to be identified. This weeks focus will be on identifying methods that the Brisbane Airport can utilize a SNS to communicate with their customers.

This weeks post will identify reasons for the airport to develop their presence on SNS such as facebook and twitter. To clearly identify whether it is worth it put the resources into developing a presence some questions need to be answered.

How does the target audience utilize social networking?
In this case I would say the target market is typically customers waiting for their flights. They would utilize social networking as a means to pass time at the airport without needing to visit every shop or idly wait for their flight.

How would we reward the employees contributing to an online presence in our organization?
Most social networking sites have metrics for calculating how many people “like” or have “read” the posts. Rewards such as small bonuses should be organized for the individuals who have the most read / liked comments or reach specific metrics (such as 100 likes for one post).

How do we increase the online presence after establishing it?
A common method of this is creating a flashmob similar to Dubai, Edmonton, Changi…Lisbon… as seen here.However we need something a bit more … unique. Alternatively we can make it worth it for customers such as offering free flights or other rewards to customers on a weekly basis based on short response questions or other kinds of competitions. These competitions do not require the customer to be at the airport to participate.

How can we get customers to spread the word?
Similar to the previous answer, we make it worth it to the customer. One method of doing this would be to offer a reward for the winner and one or two friends. This would encourage the first person who competed for the reward to ask their friends to compete and “Share” the links for additional chances of winning.

Essentially the goal of this social networking site would be to encourage employees to share information related to the airport on the social networking site with the public while also offering incentives for the public to engage with the airport. Information shared could be a range of things such as

Discounts identified at the duty free shops.

General information (Plane delays, competitions).

Media responses (Brisbane airports responses to issues such as the tiger airways issue a few months back).

Blog posts – The airport staff will be able to share information regarding their duties at the airport or other tasks to provide reading material for the public. Such information would need to be approved for safety reasons though.

What other information should be shared through the social networking site? Would you monitor the airport SNS (facebook or twitter) page for the chance to win flights or other prizes?

Today I will be discussing the role wiki’s can play in an organizational context, specifically the Brisbane airport.

What is a wiki?

A wiki page is a web application that allows end users to create articles, modify articles and access articles through web browsers. They essentially act as large databases for organizations on topics ranging from help information to current projects. They can be as formal or informal as the organization desires as well. The Wikipedia site is considered to be formal as most pages go through a few edits before they are published for the world to view while in some wiki’s any edits or new articles are available for reading immediately.

*Wiki would reduce the need for information counters around the airports as well!

How should Brisbane airport use one?

The Brisbane Airport would be able to utilize a wiki page that is managed by employees but with customer contributions towards the objective of increasing customer satisfaction with the airport. More specifically, the wiki page would have the following goals:

Information about destinations (destination stores, dining locations, things to do and other general information).

General information about the planes and processes being undertaken at the airport involving getting passengers from point A to B.

Allow the customers to provide useful information for other customers (potentially international visitors).

Reduce customer boredom or idleness in airports by encouraging them to contribute to the wiki.

How to encourage customer participation?

A strategy for encouraging users to contribute to the wiki would be to offer rewards in a similar matter to the idea in my previous blog post. Users would be encouraged to provide information or make edits on any topic they feel comfortable with and leave their membership number (if they have one) or their contact details. This would allow the Brisbane airport to contact them with potential rewards via email or phone.

The rewards solution is only viable for Australian residents as it may take more then a day to get back to the customers. The wiki however would still be able to provide useful information to international customers.

Question

If you were in an airport and upon connecting to its Wi-Fi an airport wiki page loaded, would you browse it?

This week I will be discussing an idea for social media integration into airports that may be able to engage the customers waiting for their flights and even the individuals visiting the airport to browse the duty free stores.

The Environment

An airport is a large organization that connects thousands of passengers to their flights everyday. The customers tend to arrive a an hour or more early for their flight and suffer from wait times once they have checked in. There is also the case where a customer is being connecting from one flight to another and may be subjected to long wait times (I was stuck in an airport for 9 hours once).

The space for innovation is in the fact that thousands customers are required to spend time waiting for their flights and most airports have only addressed this by setting up duty free shops and dining locations. Today many airports have set up some sort of social media presence or enterprise 2.0 strategy for purposes such as crisis management, customer service and increasing commercial activity etc. However social media / enterprise 2.0 can be used for more then communications between the airport and its customers.

An Idea

Customers are able to answer a question posted to the social media site twitter or facebook every 1-2 hours and the best response to the question will receive an award of some sort. In order to answer the question the user is required to follow or like the Airports or its subsidiaries pages. This will encourage users to engage with the airport and read other users responses to the question. It will also give the waiting customers a page that they can interact with each other on which may lead to meeting up in person. The same page could also be used for communication with the customers and information gathering or surveys.

Some Benefits and Pitfalls

Benefits

Increased social media following and coverage (more access to friends of fans etc).

Users have a positive experience in the airport (I was extremely bored in that airport for 9 hours).

Users are enticed to interact for prizes such as free meals or discount cards.

Pitfalls

Requires a social media team to moderate the page (thousands of answers per day and other posts to be moderated).

Requires a pick up location and method of identification for the winner of the hourly prizes.

Thanks for reading my post, I hope you’re all having a great weekend!

Question

Can you think of any significant benefits and pitfalls not yet mentioned?

This weeks post will briefly list a few of the common issues in social networking sites and methods for over-coming them.

Implementing social networking sites or taking advantage of the sites already implemented over the web can bring many benefits to an organization. Yet they are usually under-utilized not adopted at all.

Main reasons for under-utilization of social media adoption

Fear: Management are usually scared of implementing Social Media into their organizations as they wouldn’t have complete control of what appears on the social media e.g. it may cause reputational damage to the company. However a lot of companies are just scared of change or failure of its implementation.

Leadership: Senior management afraid of using social media due to lack of skills or knowledge in its utilization. As a result of this leaders prefer to keep business as usual and stifle any new technology (similar to fear of change).

Distractions: Social media can considered a distraction to organizations employees. This is usually due to the leaders having a poor understand of social media and using this excuse to not implement it or it may be a representation of a larger trust issue between the leaders and the employees.

Based off the research here I believe the fears would be overcome by following these guidelines for planning.

Planning for social media implementation

Thoroughly plan out the social media tools to be used and the requirements of them by the leadership and the employees. This would calm the leadership down so they do not feel like they are blindly implementing social media and also reduce fear overall.

Leadership must be on-board with social media implementation be willing to communicate about it. This will allow the employees to communicate with the leaders about social media and encourage them to adopt it for themselves.

Create a social media policy. This ties into the first point about planning out the implementation and will reduce misuse of the social media tools and allow users to see what they are allowed and not allowed to do.

Encourage employees to use the social media tools and allow them to have their say. Conversations should not be limited unless they violate the code of conduct. If conversations are limited or censored then employees will turn from social media tools as it would create a negative environment.

Keep the content up to date and relevant. This will encourage users to continue using the sites whether they be internal or external which will create a healthy atmosphere.

Again plan and research the great social media sites such as Wikipedia or other blogging sites. This will reduce the ambigousness of just implementing a blog without any idea of how to maintain it.

I believe if each organization sufficiently planned for the social media implementation, then a lot of the fears of the unknown would subside and leaders would embrace it. If leaders do not embrace the social media tools, then their subordinates will follow and it will never be adopted properly.

As seen here the large grocery retailer SUPERVALU was able to implement social media successfully as the leaders saw Social Media as a useful tool and utilized it. This lead to them being able to communicate to their subordinates who then also embraced it.

Has anybody heard of other methods to help organizations overcome issues of social media implementation? If so let us know!

This weeks post will be detailing the risks of ignoring social media for educational departments in regards to legal issues. Firstly I would like to point out that the content in this post may or may not be legally accurate, I am not qualified in any to give legal advice and it should not be interpreted as such.

The organizations this blog post refers to are schools and governing education organizations. I am under the impression that schools are supposed to help students through any psychological distress and attempt to stop bullying, whether it be cyber or real world.

“SNS (Social Networking Sites) have been the subject of rapid growth in Australia and overseas, particularly among young people. They have arguably become an essential part of life for many Australian teenagers. For some teenagers, social networking may offer particularly valuable social benefits” (1)Henderson, de Zwart, Lindsay, Phillips. The role that social media sites play in teenagers lives is undeniably important in this modern day. They allow teenagers to express themselves, connect with friends and share information rapidly.

Recently in Australia a student committed suicide over cyber bullying on Facebook. It is not the first time that this has happened as well. I believe one death is enough and that schools should not be allowed to turn a blind eye to students who are clearly under emotional distress due to cyber bullying if the issue is brought to their attention.

The ACMA CyberSmart page here addresses the roles of the school regarding Cyberbullying. They essentially are encouraged to establish a cyber safety team, policies and procedures and educate parents, teenagers and students.

In the news report I watched last week the family of the victim are now attempting to take legal action against the education department. The news report on this is here. It seems the schools didn’t act enough on behalf of the student, however they are limited in what they are able to do.

Question: Should the education departments be legally responsible for not having a large enough input on the issue of Breannas cyberbullying? Perhaps they could have punished the bully’s harder. But what can the schools do to put a stop to cyber-bullying other than educating students, parents and teachers and punishing students who do it? If schools continue to turn a blind eye towards social media, could that be considered negligence in unfortunate cases such as this?

Also could we apply the fact that inside an organization if an employee cyber bullies another employee that he may be liable for dismissal even if it is outside of working hours? Would that be applicable to students who can be identified as part of the school?

I believe that the education departments need to set a strict social media policy for all students and teachers and that the students should be educated on the schools social media policy. This may deter students from committing cyber bullying if they fear the consequences and know teachers are aware of it rather than thinking since its on the internet it is invisible. Also should the education departments have law suits filed against them, they will be able to show that they have made effort to address the issues of cyber bullying.

I am curious to see how the legal action against the NSW Education Department resolves.

I would also like to point out that I had a hard time finding this news report as there are many other cases where teenagers commit suicide over cyber bullying.

The goal of this weeks post is to touch on a few of enterprise 2.0’s advantages and risks. Enterprise 2.0 implementation can go as far as having a company Facebook page / Twitter account that interfaces with the public or setting up a Microsoft Sharepoint Server that allows internal collaboration and learning to occur efficiently. Different companies have different requirements of Enterprise 2.0, but it is almost always possible to implement in a fashion that will improve the companies overall efficiency. Companies implementing Enterprise 2.0 may be considered innovative today but in the future it may become a requirement for success.

Enterprise 2.0 – The positives

Productivity / Efficiency: Enterprise 2.0 increases the productivity of organizations in a multitude of ways. A few of these are:

Reducing email traffic – Time is saved by not requiring employees to search through emails for specific files and reading multiple emails on the same topic. A project wall could be started that allows project information to be regularly edited on the topic. Employees would need to only check the wall to see all the documents and updates relating to the project.

Centralizing data storage / management – Using an example similar to the previous point, the files could be updated / edited and links to the most up to date files would always be accessible from the projects wall rather than needing to manually search through a hierarchy of folders.

Knowledge: A centralized location of data improves a companies ability to gain knowledge on specific topic. Microsoft performed a case study on the telecommunications company Telus. Telus successfully implemented a Microsoft Sharepoint Server to increase the amount of informal learning within the organization. Telus was able to cut its education budget by roughly 7 million in 2010 and a further 5 million in 2011. Telus originally had 90% of learning within the company taking place in a classroom (formal learning), the 3 year plan to migrate to formal learning only taking using 50% of the education budget.

Enterprise 2.0 – Also some risks

Security: Network Security / Information Loss can occur more often when Enterprise 2.0 is implemented into an organization without giving security any thought. The best protection against security risks is to educate end users about opening suspicious programs, email notifications and sites to avoid viruses and providing education to end users so they do not accidentally leak confidential information to the public. These risks are not new to any organization with an ICT infrastructure, they can however increase the likelihood of them occurring.

Reliability: Reliability of information on blog sites or wiki’s for example is based on the person making the post. If left unregulated, the Enterprise 2.0 system could increase the speed at which wrong is spread throughout the corporation. However this can be countered if the organization scrutinizes the information rather than just agreeing with it. If countered properly then it would also teach the original poster of the incorrect content the correct information!

Does anybody have any stories or want to talk about their experiences with Enterprise 2.0 implementations? or perhaps add to my strengths and weaknesses list?

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